Archive for the 'Today In Ironfleet' Category

So, has nobody sent the numpties in empire a memo about can flippers? Is this honored art forgotten? Because man, today it’s been like shooting fish in a rain barrel.

For starters, I found Ddykarn. He made the classic mistake. He was jet-can mining in a Retriever with one T1 combat drone out. I picked up his small quantum of ore, and aligned for home. To him it must have looked like the helpless hauler was running away. His drone nibbled me. I blew him up.

Less than nine minutes later, I find another Retriever doing the same thing, only this one has mining drones out. His jet-can is almost full, so I flipped it, taking what I could carry. Again, align for home. Again, he locked me up, and launches one combat drone. Then, he simultaneously attacks me and flips the can back. This guy wanted a fight.

He got it. Note the small armor repper, which he was using heavily, for all the good it did him:

you mother fucker i hope you go to fuckin hell you stupid ass im going to hunt your sorry ass down

Getting mail like that always makes me feel better about blowing up the young and inexperienced.

So, after blowing him up, I looted his strip miner, flipped the ore back into my can (what I couldn’t carry), and docked up. Did some other errands, noticed his timer had run out, was thinking about going back to pick up the ore. When suddenly, his icon went all ragey-skull in local. My, my, did he just flip the ore back a second time? Some people need more than one exposure to life’s important lessons.

This time, I undocked in a bomber. Warped to 20. My can is gone, but there’s a flashy red Wreathe, just sitting there.

Uncloak, lock, paint, torps away!

And lo, there was an earthshattering kaboom, just as the scripture promised:

The first time I’d annoyed a mining Osprey until he warped off, then was waiting for him to return. Instead, a Dread Gurista Arrogator frigate spawned. I engaged it with heavy missile in my Crane, a slow process, when a newbie ratting in a caracal showed up. He started shooting too, but not in time. Kaboom, my wreck.

But, uh, he’s closer to it than me. Does he know it’s worth a quick scoot-n-scoop?

Apparently not — I crawled to the wreck and was rewarded with ammo, tag, a Dread Gurista small shield booster, and a DG invul. Nice!

[Updated insert: ZOMG, I am an idiot. I looked at the Dread Gurista Invulnerability Field, noted the stats were the same as Caldari Navy, and did a quick contracts check that I must have flailed somehow. Because I failed to discover that it’s a freaking 400 million ISK piece of loot! “Nice” doesn’t even begin to cover it … this is the single best item of loot in my Eve career to date.]

Then, a bit later, in another .7 system, I noticed a Hulk wreck and was going to check it out when an unlooted Dread Gurista wreck nearby caught my eye. Went to check it out and you could have knocked me over with a feather:

In all my eve career, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a ship blueprint drop of any kind. And it was just laying there in space, waiting to be salvaged!

After his recent battle Mammoth fun, I thought about setting up a classic BattleBadger. But, truth to tell, I don’t have Jim’s skill in small weapons. So I decided to stick with one of my old trusty combat Cranes.

Out to the belts. Second belt I checked, there’s a Retriever and an Osprey mining into a cluster of Giant Secure Cans. And by cluster, I mean six of them … a tight cluster, without the minimum 5 kilometer separation needed for anchoring.

Sadly, ever since they redesigned the graphics for the cans, my broken color vision makes it impossible for me to see whether a Giant Secure Can is anchored or not. There used to be a red nav light on anchored cans and a green one on unanchored ones, hard to see but distinguisable. In the redesign, they took this off, or made the shading more subtle, I’m not sure which … but now, the only way I can tell if a can is scoopable is to see it too near another can.

This cluster: too obvious to miss.

So, back I went for the big rigged bustard. Warp to the cluster of cans, silently scoop them. As my old friends in Suddenly Ninjas would have said: YOINK!

There was no sign that anybody noticed, so I docked.

Judging by the names, four of the cans “belonged” to the Retriever pilot, two of them “belonged” to the Osprey pilot. Between the six cans, there were four full cans-worth of Azure Plagioclase.

Then I went to lunch. When I came back, I had the following Notification in my mailbox:

So. Yesterday. Your trusty correspondent Jim Bridger is still stuck in high sec waiting for a jump clone timer. Can flipping in an armed destroyer is a little too … obvious and is not passing the time. I’m remembering how much fun Marlenus used to have in the combat Cranes, but I can’t fly a Crane, and I don’t have a Prowler available inside of thirty jumps. I check the market, but they’re more than sixty million, and this 0.0 PvP stuff has left me skint.

Obviously, there’s nothing for it but to step next door into Jita and set up a nice cheap battle Mammoth.

A short fitting flurry later, the Pissed Pachyderm is patrolling the belts. What’s this? A Retriever mining barge, jet can out, flying a single Hornet I drone? Surely that’s got to be bait, right?

Quick check, the pilot has a corp, only one other pilot in the corp, not in system. He’s on his own.

But if I chicken out and shy away from this juiciest of battle Mammoth targets, I might as well put the ship away. Plus, here’s the can, and it’s mostly full of the juiciest veldspar. Take what I can put in the Mammoth, flip the rest. It’s my way.

He’s locking me. The Retriever is locking me. I start locking him back, waiting nervously for four Warrior IIs or some sort of long-forgotten unobtainium GM’s-handed-them-out-as-loot-in-some-2004-event Drones-O-Death to launch and start nibbling my kidneys.

He’s locked. Still just one Hornet on me. He’s webbed, he’s pointed, and I am autocannoning him about the head and shoulders.

Faster than you’d think, he pops. No surprises, no tricks. Just kaboomage. Turns out he didn’t even have a fitting on the barge, just two strip miners and four mining drones he wasn’t using:

If I’ve ever shot at an ’03 character before, I don’t know it. And I still can’t quite figure this guy. A seven-year-old mining alt would be in a better barge, surely? Even a purchased character shouldn’t be that broke — anybody with the billions to make the buy would have some more isk available for the purchased character, right? Just can’t figure out how anybody could be simultaneously that old, that broke, and that clueless.

Got a double-deep-space message beacon from Jim Bridger late last night, flash priority. Signal quality was so bad, I thing the message drone must have had a hell of a trip before it ever got withing range of a Concord beacon.

Bottom line sounds like Jim’s deep in a wormhole complex, staring at an offline tower surrounded by most of a deathstar’s armaments, just sittin’ there waiting for an adventurous salvage corp to come along. I’m supposed to round up some battleships and haulers (and shovels and rakes and implements of destruction) and be ready to haul ass halfway across the known universe, when-and-if Jim finds some deeply-implausible chain of wormholes that doesn’t lead back to the ass-end of Syndicate where he started.

I called up the Empress of Greater Mars (you remember her? She’s the lady who managed the logistics for my one long sojourn into wormhole space) and she’s game. She’s standing by with the wormhole-fit laser battleship and an impressive array of hauler minions.

So now we wait. Updates as events warrant.

Update, a day later: The wormholes were not friendly; there’s currently no good route for the ships needed to get in there, and the mods to be salvaged aren’t worth using a bad route. So I parked a probing minion in there to wait for better wormhole conjunctions.

On a brighter note, while exploring wormhole chains I found a very-badly-defended (but alive and shields up) small tower with an Orca parked inside the shields. That’s more than Ironfleet can handle, so I passed the intel along to TEARS, in hopes that some of the merry thugs in that fine organization may be able to put together the small expedition required to liberate that Orca.

Dear Marlenus. What a time I’ve had! After tonight’s adventure, I knew you’d want another postcard.

I remember fondly the Ironfleet forays into the wormholes with The Empress and on TEARS ops. But, since I’ve been down in 0.0, I just haven’t seen very many wormholes at all. And the few I have found, didn’t lead to anywhere interesting.

Until tonight. One jump out of my “home” in 0.0, I found a wormhole leading into unknown space. As I was in a covert ops ship, I jumped on in and warped around a bit, checking for locals on my directional scanner.

It quickly developed that the system contained one armed POS and had two ships in space — a Retriever mining barge flying T1 mining drones, and a hauler. So I went to a distant location, uncloaked, dropped combat probes, recloaked, positioned the probes very carefully, and did my best “speedy probe” evolution. Just as soon as I had a warp-in on the mining barge, I pulled the combat probes back in, then warped at 100 to see what was what.

And there they were, merrily mining Arkanor from the Retriever into the hauler, via a transfer jet can. There was *nobody* else visible on directional scan, but of course there might be other cloakers like myself.

So, back “home” I went (2 jumps) for a combat ship. Normally I would have recruited some other guys from the alliance, but everybody else in local was vigorously engaged in a long-running and futile-seeming effort to bait and trap a cloaky Vagabond that’s been hanging out in “our” system. So, I didn’t want to try and pull them away for a wormhole mission that won’t advance our local military interests.

Instead, I decided to jump in my trusty Sabre light interdictor, which I’ve trained on for years but never actually flown much. (I did lose one shortly after getting to 0.0, in the process of which learning that I don’t know how to use them properly in fleets. So, my other two have been gathering hangar dust.)

My reasoning is that I could hit the wormhole, warp directly to the barge/hauler pair, pop a bubble, and with a bit of luck maybe even get two kills. And (I hoped) if I could pod the hauler pilot clear out of the wormhole, I might even get a chance to sneak back in later and salvage some of the yummy Arkanor they were mining.

Like any military plan, it did not survive contact with the enemy intact. Here’s how it actually went down:

I hit the worm hole and warped right to my Retriever bookmark. Unfortunately, he must have been alert (or lucky) with his d-scanning, because by the time I got there, the Retriever was gone. (I know he left in a hurry because his mining drones were still there.) So, I popped the bubble and engaged the hauler.

Weird, it’s some Amarr hauler I’ve never seen before. Impel? Which one is the Impel?

And right about then I noticed, this Impel is isn’t dying as fast as I’d hoped. In fact, it’s pretty crunchy. Did I really catch me a Transport?

So then I spent the next little while chortling as I hauled 1504 units of Arkanor (3 trips in my Prowler blockade runner) home to my hangar. (With my refine skills at the local station that’s roughly 2000 Megacyte and 1000 Zydrine — quality salvaging in anybody’s book!) The Retriever pilot was briefly on scan in a Heron, but I never encountered him again.

Still having a good time in 0.0. My ship losses aren’t too bad so far, and I’ve had quite a bit of luck getting faction mods off the local rats.

Last night I had a fun encounter in the system next door to the Steel Fleet home base. Some of the boys (and one girl) were forming up for a combat roam that I was not planning to go out with, due to it being my bedtime; so I went out in my Cheetah covert ops ship to look for faction spawns and whatnot. Basically, I was just cruising around looking for opportunities and trouble.

When I jumped into the system, I found an unknown neutral (Ferry092 of GNocide corp) in local, who immediately hailed me in friendly fashion:

I took his “legendary Jim Bridger” greeting to mean that he’s a reader of Ironfleet.com — I guess word gets around!

While we were having the quoted conversation, I was warping cloaked from belt to belt, checking the rats. About the time he asks “what brings you out here?” I picked up his Myrmidon and Hobgoblin II drones on my directional scanner, and a moment later I landed (cloaked) in the belt where he was ratting … with his drones still out.

So, of course I get on Ventrillo with the Steel Fleet cutthroats who were (when last seen) sitting on “our” station undock, shooting aimlessly at each other and bullshitting about ship fits.

“Break, break, I’ve got eyes on a ratting Myrmidon battlecruiser, he’s sixty clicks away from me with his drones out, I am cloaked and approaching him, can I get a fleet invite so you bastards can come warp to me and blow him up?”

[interested fleet chatter]

“Roger, thank you, I’m in a covert ops ship, yes I’ve got a point but those Hobgoblin IIs of his will eat me alive, you’ll have to be fast as hell. Let me know when you’re ready to jump into the system…”

Right about this time I notice him pulling in his drones, and I see that one of our Steel Fleet guys has jumped in prematurely. There is cussing. Then the Myrmidon warps off in the direction of a planet. I tell my guys to hurry, and I warp to the planet at ten klicks.

Imagine my glee and surprise to find the battlecruiser ten klicks from me. Did he really warp to zero? Yes, he did.

“Guys, get your asses in here, tackler, please tell me when you’re in warp to me.”

Moments later, I heard a tackler announce he was in warp to me, so I uncloaked, pointed the Myrm, and went into the fastest orbit I could manage — which is pretty fast in a Cheetah.

The battlecruiser locked me (faster than I expected), warp scrambled me, and launched his drones. My pain began. Our tackler landed and announced a tackle, the whole fleet began screaming for me to disengage. Which I attempted to do, as by now I was in deep armor.

Then I discovered I was webbed, maybe even double-webbed. Yikes! I’m in structure now, and crawling for distance. The whole fleet has arrived and is pounding this guy, but will it be fast enough?

Finally I got some distance, and my warp drive engaged. I landed at another planet, streaming flames, with about 40% structure left. Too close!

Ferry092 got his pod away, and exchanged a few pleasantries in local before he left. He was pretty cool about the whole thing, at least until one of our guys got a little bit smacky. But I’m still wondering, why did he keep ratting after I effectively told him my guys were one jump away?

Long-time readers will remember Ironfleet member Jim Bridger, our small-ships guy who flies Thrashers like he stole them. (Which, truth be told, he usually did — or at least, he had me build them out of minerals he did not mine himself.) Given the propensity of destroyers to pop like balloons at a porcupine convention, Ironfleet has standing market orders for high-meta 250mm and 280mm artilleries, which Jim hoards, in gleaming stacks of seven, in carefully labeled Medium Secure Containers with names like “destroyer gunsets — 280 TII”.

The other day, Jim got recruiting EVEmail from a CEO who was our favorite fleet commander back in Ironfleet’s faction warfare days. It’s the usual story, there’s a beachhead being established in 0.0, and aggressive interceptor pilots are needed. Jim’s got a hangar full of inties and a load of maxed-out skills, but there isn’t much call for interceptors in our usual high-sec shenanigans, so he’s got damn little real experience flying the things. This seemed like a good opportunity to get some.

So, somewhat sheepishly, he asked for leave from Ironfleet, and I gave it to him. He has promised to send postcards from the front lines. I can predict the first one: “Dear Marlenus, having a great time. Please send me six more Claws and a big bucket of Nanite Paste. Sincerely, Jim Bridger.”

You remember Greater Mars — that’s the POS that Ironfleet uses in w-space, courtesy of the lady I like to call The Empress (not her real name).

Well, Greater Mars has been kind of a bust ever since Apocrypha 1.1 came out. When they reduced the number of Gravimetric spawns to improve wormhole navigation, they seem to have tweaked some of the other spawn mechanics as well. Before that patch, we got a radar spawn about once a week, a couple of ladar spawns a week, and 1-2 Cosmic Anomalies a day. In the month (ish) since the expansion? Wormholes, a couple of ladar spawns, a couple of grav spawns. That’s it. Zero radar, zero mag, many fewer ladar, and astronomically fewer (but richer) grav spawns. Maybe two Cosmic Anomalies. Pretty much, nothing.

The upshot of all of this was that there wasn’t anything to do in there. Before 1.1, just clearing the guards for the grav sites took an hour or two a day, and made enough sleeper salvage to pay the POS fuel bill. Post 1.1, Dingo did some AFK gas mining, and that was it. I didn’t have ore mining gear in there, there were no sleepers to kill, and the POS was not paying for its upkeep.

So, I was thinking about having The Empress take it down. But, you know, we probably took a dozen hauler loads of stuff in there, and 15 or 20 ships of various kinds. Taking it down? A huge pain. It was easier to keep fueling the thing, and hope we’d just been getting a bad run of spawning luck. Perhaps the random number generator has just been hating us. It’s also the case that, by spending less time in there, it’s possible we missed some spawns that got found and run by visitors we never saw. So, I was waffling.

Then two days ago, the Empress logged in to find her POS in reinforced mode, with all her guns and facilities either incapacitated or offlined. WTF?

She had emails from Concord indicating that five pilots spent eight and a half hours burning everything down and putting the tower in reinforced mode. The good news: she’d stoked the (small Minmatar) tower with as much Strontium Clathrates as it would hold. We can only imagine (with pleasure) their frustrated groaning when they were presented with a reinforced timer with 41 hours on its clock.

At that point, we had a tricky decision to make. Can this tower be saved? For offensive modules, it only had three guns, a web, and a warp disruptor, all now incapacitated and in need of lengthy repair. With the tower in reinforced, the web and warp disruptor couldn’t be put back into service, and there isn’t enough power on a small tower to mount serious defensive armaments. Worse yet, the corporate hangar array was offline — which meant that none of the goods could be removed. There wasn’t anything too valuable…except Dingo’s gas, and quite a lot Sleeper salvage, and a fairly big pile of expensive T2 fittings. Too much to give away without a fight.

The ship maintenance array stays online in reinforced, apparently, and it contained many ships: a drake, some Caracals, Buzzard and Manticore, some Ospreys, some Thrashers and Rifters for Jim Bridger, half a dozen haulers, and at least a dozen miscellaneous frigates. These, at least, we could remove.

The Empress decided to evacuate what she could (the expensive ships) and then mount the best possible defense, with an eye toward removing the goods from the hangar array (if necessary, while under fire) after the tower came out of reinforced. She was hopeful that the aggressors wouldn’t be back — logistics in wormholes being what they are — but given their initial determination, not hopeful enough.

Complicating all of this was the fact that I, Marlenus, was in my Dodixie jump clone, because TEARS has a new war declaration against it that went active at the same time. So, I wasn’t free to vanish into Greater Mars to help with the defense, nor could I (well, I could have, but I didn’t want to) ask my TEARS peeps to help me mount a defense fleet.

So. The Empress. First thing she did was scan out the wormhole de jour. It was ugly — dropping into Minmatar space way the-Hek-and-gone out there, literally. (Coming from Jita it’s a dozen jumps past Hek.) Ah, well, that’s a logistics problem for another day. She ferried all the combat ships out to high sec and parked them.

Then, she jumped in an Osprey and started repping the guns. That took most of a day, but she got them all back in operation. She was starting on the web and the disruptor (although they can’t be turned back on due to no CPU from the reinforced tower) when the aggressors came back.

A word about the aggressors: They were a collection of pilots from the Rogue Windz Interprizes LLC [ROWIN], in the Blue Sun Trust alliance, led by their CEO, Icuwarrior. Pretty cool guys, mostly, although the Empress did get some drunken and belligerent mails from a Drake pilot, one Jlee, after Dingo Indere accidentally decloaked him at a planet. (Dingo was in his unarmed gas-mining Badger II and thought he was dead, but Jlee apparently thought it was a trap and warped away in alarm. Then Jlee started drunkmailing. It was pretty funny. Sample: “you know that pos well go down so you what to get all you can out so get what you what out and yes i know”.)

Anyway, when they came back and started shooting at The Empresses’ guns, she was apalled to see that the guns were not reliably shooting back. We’re still not sure why not — they’re supposed to shoot at anybody with a standing of 1.0 or lower. Once she set that number to 10, that problem went away. The guns started shooting. But that’s going to be hard on friends and allies who may stumble in from time to time.

And then the fun started. She got to “control” the guns — something she’d never done before. So, she began shooting at Icuwarrior (in his Navy Raven), one Vaderrr (in a Minnie battlecruiser) and their friend JleePlus in a Prophecy, who was apparently the go-fer who brought replacement ammo.

For guns, all she had was two small artillery batteries and one medium. That was enough to melt the Prophecy if it didn’t drop ammo and scoot — so that’s what it did.

The battlecruiser was a bit trickier. At first, six or eight salvos was enough to put the BC in deep armor and make it warp away for awhile. Eventually, though, Vaderrr figured out how to keep his transversal high enough to thwart the medium gun, and he could tank the smalls for quite awhile. He’d still warp away, but not often enough to prevent him from doing a lot of damage.

The Navy Raven was a tough nut. Although its tank couldn’t handle all three guns forever, it could handle them for a long long time. I’d say it had to warp out maybe three times, over twice that many hours — not counting other times it left briefly (for more torps?) when its tank was not in question.

Yes, I did say six hours. These three pilots warped in and out for six hours — and shot at the three guns when they were present — for six hours. Once the first gun went down, so did any hope of hurting them, but The Empress kept at it, catching Vaderrr several times when he got bored or lazy and forgot to orbit. But, eventually, all the POS guns were once again incapacitated.

The Empress, meanwhile, was learning to shoot POS guns. Icuwarrior started with some drones (and apparently resupplied them once) but those, The Empress figured out, can be instapopped by a lucky hit from small tower artillery. All it takes is ammo and patience and luck and time.

During this time, there were various exchanges and communiques. Early in the festivities, Jim Bridger flew out in a rifter and attempted to tackle the Navy Raven, thinking that if he could just hold it there while the guns chewed on it….

Jim is an enthusiastic young pilot, but his career has been mostly spent in high sec. He forgot about the humble smart-bomb. Popped and podded before he ever knew what hit him. Bummer.

On the bright side, that put him back near Jita. The Empress, meanwhile, looked at all the newly available power on her POS (what with all the CPU-using facilities being offline) and placed an order for six new guns and plenty of ammo. Which Jim, after buying a new clone, dutifully bought and ferried about thirty jumps to the station nearest the wormhole. (Jim is in TEARS. There’s a war on. This was hazardous, though ultimately uneventful, work.)

At some point during the six hours of gun-reshooting, Icuwarrior delivered a friendly (in tone) communique. He was complimentary about the defensive efforts, but stated “the second the tower comes out of reinforced there will be a heavy DPS Alliance fleet sitting here to finish the work. You can keep wasting time, ISK and effort trying to keep it alive but this tower is toast. Much better weps today BTW.”

We knew they’d had five pilots in system the day before. Three pilots spent six hours shooting three guns. Would they have bothered if they could get an Alliance fleet to do it the easy way? We were skeptical. Adding to the skepticism, at some point during the six hours, the wormhole expired and a new one spawned — this time, to a station deep in Khanid space, dozens of jumps from the wormhole ROWIN came in through. What alliance is going to send a battleship fleet dozens of jumps to burn down an empty tower in near-worthless w-space?

No, The Empress figured they were hoping to do the job themselves, or with a few additional pilots. (There were hints on scan that they had a few other people hanging around in the system, logging in and out, who would presumably hang around for another day. These included Jlee, the drunken Drake pilot, and possibly a couple others.) In conversation with Icuwarrior, he indicated that his organization had another wormhole system, of the same class as Greater Mars, that they considered “a gold mine” and defended with three large faction towers. Even adjusting for possible boasting, this offered a hint of the motive for the attack. But the promised heavy DPS fleet seemed unlikely, so she decided to defend against the visible threat, as best she might.

Eventually, Icuwarrior and Vaderrr logged off, their work done. Jlee and possibly other pilots were still in system (sometimes being seen warping in and cloaking) so The Empress knew she was under observation. (Just to drive home the point, Miss Plus sent Evemail: “I see you.”) But still, what could The Empress do? She’d been playing for about fourteen hours at that point, and she was tired and sleepy, but she had Jim Bridger’s boatload of new guns to play with. She ended up staying up about three hours past her usual bedtime, but she got six new guns anchored, and online and stocked with ammo. Then, she crashed.

After five hours of sleep, she woke up and got back in the Osprey. She had at that point two medium and four small guns — twice the armament that she started with. She was able to offline the ship maintenance array (after dumping a cloud of cheap frigates out of it) and get enough power to online the original medium gun (giving her three of them). No sooner had she gotten it online, then a new pilot (Asahi Halycon) uncloaked in a Dominix and started pounding torpedoes toward the guns.

The Empress took control of all three medium guns. In three salvos, the Dominix had to warp away.

And that was the pattern all the long day. The Empress ran around in her repping Osprey, repairing up the other four incapacitated modules; but it was slow work because, from time to time, Asahi and/or Vaderrr (now in a battleship also) would uncloak and attack. They now, however, always had to warp away before they could do any serious damage. Which The Empress took to be an endorsement of her new micro-deathstar configuration.

Finally, after a long and boring day, the reinforced clock started to tick its last. Every known member of ROWIN was logging in, except Icuwarrior the CEO. She assumed they were waiting for him.

The tower came out of reinforced. She was amazed to discover that you can’t online modules at that point — you have to wait until the shields regen from 25% to 50%, or until you can rep them up. She wasn’t in a position to do that. But, now, she could remove things from the Corporate Hangar Array.

Everything of value, it turns out, fit in Jim’s hauler, the one he brought the new guns in. So she loaded him up.

Icuwarrior logged in. There was a disturbance in the force. Three battleships plus at least one Drake, plus perhaps two or three other ships, type unknown. Could they do a rolling thunder attack, retreating in turn to self-repair? Spider tank? The Empress was concerned but confident, now that she had enough firepower to make battleships warp out. It might be ugly, but these boys would get a fight, even if they got their as-yet-unseen heavy DPS fleet.

The Empress bounced to the wormhole to check for a bubble. Clear. She gave Jim the order to run for it with the last of the loot. He warped to the bubble. She bounced back to the POS.

Jim arrived at the wormhole. At 6,000 meters and spinning, due to the odd wormhole approach/bounce physics.

Jump range is 5,000 meters. And guess what was waiting for Jim? Icuwarrior in his Navy Raven, and Miss Plus in another Drake. There were drones out.

Jim did all he could do in his butt-slow Minmatar industrial. He gave the command to approach the gate, he turned on his shield booster, and he began to spam the jump button. By now, he was taking fire and well into armor.

It’s possible there was praying. Jim says he was just cussing.

Then “Phase change is already in progress”. Yes! He was through, with nothing worse than a twenty-five-thousand ISK armor repair bill.

Icuwarrior said “nice work”, The Empress said “Thanks, that was the last load of sleeper loot” or words to that effect, and Icuwarrior said: “Relax and get some sleep.”

And thus did two hard day’s defense work pay off. Too much nut for the local forces to crack, not enough value to justify bringing in the heavy hitters, if they ever existed. Wormhole design at its finest.

Further pleasantries were exchanged — the ROWIN guys gave Jim Bridger back his corpse out in high sec — and that was that. It was over, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Why did The Empress fight so hard for an unprofitable POS in low-quality w-space, one we were thinking of taking down anyway? Sheer cussedness, mostly. True, there was that one load of fairly expensive fitting gear and sleeper loot (including a bunch of that gas that Dingo harvested), but more important to her was (1) the opportunity to learn by experience a bunch of POS warfare mechanics, and (2) that peculiar EVE unwillingness to give the other guy the satisfaction of a victory. Unless they come back in force another day, The Empress has won. That was worth two long hard days of POS defense.

As of now, the tower is back above 50% and refilled with stront and fuel, the hangar arrays are offline, and the defensive modules are all online and working. We’ve got the world’s smallest deathstar — it’s cute, like a ninja hamster or something. But, half a billion ISK worth of ships and gear is now buried deep in Minmatar and Amarr space (to be recovered via tedious AFK hauling, some other day, after the war unless the Empress does it herself). My guess is that the Empress will leave the tower up for a couple weeks at least, but will probably tear it down eventually, to be replaced by a more robust medium tower placed deeper in w-space, next time.